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Ξ” but you do not understand, i am different! i said throughout my active addiction Ξ”

Posted: Sun, Feb 1, 2009 09:40:23 AM

i probably screamed it at my first meeting. perhaps i have even caught myself whining it recently. okay, second attempt. i feel like such a tool when two or three hundred words get flushed into the bit bucket. but anyhow, what i heard this morning was the paradox of although i am a unique individual, i am the same as addicts everywhere. there is not a soul in the world who has the same feelings and experiences, and hopes, and abilities and intellect and education and opinions as i do. that is a good thing, because i believe the world is hardly ready for more than one of me. nor do i believe that i have an obligation to create another me, out of the clay of the men who honor me by calling me their sponsor. before i forget…

HAPPY 11TH CLEAN DATE ANNIVERSARY JAY T
THANKS FOR BEING HERE FOR ME

&hellip, and now where was i? oh yeah, there is nothing in our literature to even suggest that i am not a unique individual, or that i have to toe some party line by becoming a clone of the members who have walked before me.
BUT, the feelings i have, the thoughts i harbor, the behaviors i engage in, and the devices i use to protect myself from life on life’s terms are so similar to addicts everywhere it is here that the differences end. of course my bottom could have been uglier, i could have used more and different substances, i could have lost more, my desperation could have been deeper, but none of that is relevant to this discussion,. i can recover in spite of those trivial differences, if i truly and honestly concede to my innermost self, that yes i am an addict, not an addict of some kind, not a junkie, not a recovering person, just a plain, garden variety addict, who desires a new way in which to live. it is my language, and how i view myself, that keeps me isolated from the fellowship, as those actions allow me to dip back into addiction and look for whatever difference i can find. i hear that in meetings, coming out of my mouth, some days and it just shocks the sh!t out of me, after all, after all this time, i should know better.
well i do, but like all addicts in recovery, i still suffer from lapses of sanity, and need to jump back into the pool of active addiction with both feet from time to time. why this is part of my recovery story, i do not have a clue, but i am fortunate that i also have a POWER that rescues me before i have to take the final act of using, by yanking me out of the pool by the short hairs. it is because i am the same, and i have a shared program of recovery, that these rescues are possible, and i have yet to use, since the day i made the decision to become part of the way of living. so it is off to the barber shop and into the showers, or maybe off to the streets, the next few minutes will tell, but enough of this random brain dump for now.

∞ DT ∞


Another Look

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Tao Te Ching

☯ The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao ☯

The Tao Teh King, or The Tao and Its Characteristics
by Lao-Tse
Translated by James Legge

Book 2

1) He who knows these two things finds in them also his model and
rule. Ability to know this model and rule constitutes what we call
the mysterious excellence (of a governor). Deep and far-reaching is
such mysterious excellence, showing indeed its possessor as opposite
to others, but leading them to a great conformity to him.